DESCRIPTION (Applicant's Description) This proposal requests funds to support travel expenses of approximately 25 U.S. Scientists, of whom approximately ten participants have an official capacity such as organizers and invited speakers and approximately fifteen are young investigators (including women and minorities), to attend the International Biometric Conference which will be held December 13-18, 1998 in Cape Town South Africa. The strength of the meetings lies in the broad international participation of statisticians, biologists and mathematicians interested in quantitative and statistical aspects of agriculture, biology, genetics, epidemiology, pharmacology, medicine, ecology, public health and other fields. Topics to be discussed on statistical issues directly related to these areas include modeling and inference of infectious diseases, cancer, HIV, pharmaceutical bioequivalence, longitudinal data analysis, linear and generalized linear models, space-time epidemiological analyses and models, survival analysis, optimal design mixtures, classification, toxicology analyses, Gibbs sampling, genetics and environmetrics, all of which have direct bearing on solutions to the major concerns of today including ecology and the environment, AIDS, cancer and heart disease, plant science epidemiology, agriculture, forestry, etc. In addition, discussions on fundamental statistical issues of repeated measures, structural inference, image processing and causal inference all have direct application to current health related and agricultural sciences. It is anticipated that the Conference, which is the major international meeting of biostatisticians and biometricians throughout the world will be attended by 500 or more scientists from the international community.